A Moment in Time: The Sardari Lal Parasher Retrospective (review)

A Moment in Time: The Sardari Lal Parasher Retrospective was a fortnight-long exhibition that brought together some of the rare works by one of modern India's significant visionaries, Sardari Lal Parasher (1904-1990). A series of discussions and panels throughout the event provided insight into the work of an artist and thinker sparsely mentioned in Indian art and history texts. Having participated in the most tumultuous times of Indian history (i.e. the independence struggle, partition and the subsequent massive nation-building efforts), Parasher speculated deeply on the idea of modernism and how modernity would be visualized in the Indian context. This project was indeed complex, and continues to be so; for the investment of India's cultural specificity cannot be accomplished without evoking the Indian philosophical thought that is embedded in all disciplines, including the arts. The points of contact and sharp variations between the tenets of modernism as it emerged in the West and the Indian tradition inject as much rigor as disputation into situating modernity within the Indian local.

Parasher's work is characterized by a sense of transition—one that resists resolution. His work emulates both the immediacies of the environment he encountered (having migrated to India upon partition and served as a commandant of a refugee camp in Punjab) and a timeless, spiritual, almost hypnotic quality. His Partition Sketches, the most moving series, reflects intensely the agonies that the end of the imperial era brought to the subcontinent. With great concern and dignity the sketches portray the silence, grace and resilience of those who migrated in the mass exodus. The rest of his works are also laden with an almost imperceptible sense of anxiety, felt in the vibrancy and tensions in the compositions.

The formal and material aspects of the work are subtly alluring. They are underpinned by a deep personal response to the Indian aesthetic tradition as enshrined in India's ancient texts. The curvilinear form and the motif of shakti(energy, the female goddess/principle) occur often. In one of his statements, Parasher termed his approach as pranantarik( prana, or life force, bound inwards): "It is individual, diffused . . . an upsurge of prana shaktior vital life force." One can hardly encapsulate the experience of participating in his work. And it is in precisely this way that the Indian tradition is invoked fully in Parasher, as the aesthetic experience is more than visual or pertinent only to the form or content of the work.

Responding to Parasher's thinking, the talks and seminars at the retrospective also delved into the question of modernity. They succeeded in injecting necessary complexity into the idea of modernity generally, and textuality more specifically. The first seminar, "Positing Modernity in India as a Question Mark," interrogated modernism as a universal and temporally consistent encounter. Author and art critic Gita Kapur succinctly emphasized ideological investigations for contextualizing modernity and extrapolating it from Western hegemonic discourses. The most active sites of contest, she noted, fall outside the West, where the experience of modernity has been disjunctive and dialogic for categories such as the subaltern. The moments of disjuncture, which are widely discussed within postcolonial studies, command possibilities for empowerment as they make occasions for "reinventing and reinscribing oneself in history and politics," according to Kapur.

The discussion following the panel concluded that modernity outside the European and North American nexus was variegated chronologically in comparison with the dominant West and within national formations where modernity has not been unified or blended either, thus hinting at the ignorance and universalizing and dominating tendencies in the preoccupations and concerns of some Western academics with respect to the "breakdowns" instituted by late capitalism. The dalitmovement in India, the ecofeminist struggles across portions of the "Third World," political assertions on behalf of peripheralstates: These are situated in moments of discontinuity with dominant ideological discourses that force the examination...